How Many More Workdays?

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July 13, 2007 @ 3:18 PM
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MS Excel,MS Office Help |
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How Many More Workdays?

Ever need to calculate the number of workdays left until a deadline?

What did you do? Did you pull out your ever present calendar and begin counting?

Oops, lost count! Start over.

Or not.

What about letting MS Excel do the counting for you?

If you have a start date, end date and a list of any weekday holidays that shouldn’t be counted (the function automatically leaves weekends out of the count), you’ve got the ingredients for a quick Excel answer to your question!

The first thing you need to do is enter your start date, end date and any weekday holidays into Excel.

For example, you could quickly set up something like this:

Now, in another cell, you’re ready to enter the formula:

=NETWORKDAYS(start_date, end_date, holidays)

“Start_date,” “end_date” and “holidays” from the formula should be replaced with the location of the cell containing the information. (Unless you’re into Naming ranges, that is. After you’ve named the ranges to your liking, you can use them in the formula).

If you have more than one holiday date, simply enter (after the second comma) the location of the first cell, a colon and then the location of the cell containing the last date.

The above example would require this formula:

=NETWORKDAYS(B2,C2,A2:A4)

That’s it!

When you hit Enter, you should get a count that equals the number of workdays that exist within your specified information.

Here’s a special note: This function is part of an Add-In ToolPak, so if you’re getting the error of #NAME, you’ll need to go to the Tools menu, Add-Ins choice.

In the Add-Ins window, check the Analysis ToolPak choice and click OK.

I found that the Add-In didn’t immediately remove the error, but when I restarted Excel, everything worked wonderfully. Give it a try!